Incident Leadership for PMs: Restore, Communicate and Prevent After a Global Outage

You are the product manager for a product that has just caused an outage affecting customers around the world. How would you handle it? Walk through what you would do while the outage is happening, in the days after service is restored, and over the longer term, and make clear what you own as the product manager compared with engineering, support and leadership. ```hint Restore first, explain later While customers are down, the most valuable question is not why it happened but what the fastest safe way back is. Decide which questions must wait until service is restored, and who answers each one. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - What does "caused" mean here: is our own product down for every customer, or did a change in our product break systems that customers or other services depend on? - What kind of product and customers are involved: a business-critical cloud service with contractual availability commitments, or a consumer app? - Do we already know the trigger, such as a recent release or configuration change, or is the cause still unknown? - Is the outage still ongoing, or has service already come back? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Putting mitigation and customer impact ahead of root-cause analysis while customers are down, including when to roll back - A clear role for the product manager inside an incident structure, alongside the incident lead, engineers, support and executives, rather than directing the technical fix - Customer and stakeholder communication: early acknowledgement, a steady update cadence, outreach to the largest customers, and an honest account of the cause - A blameless post-incident review and concrete prevention work, prioritized against the roadmap - Measures of recovery and of the lasting effect: time to restore, customer impact, support load, credits, renewals and trust ### Follow-up Questions - Engineering can fix forward in about four hours, or roll back now but lose some customer changes made since the release. Which do you choose, and who makes the call? - A large customer wants compensation well beyond your standard service credits and hints that it will not renew. How do you respond? - Two months later, the prevention work from the review competes with a launch leadership has already announced. How do you make the case for it?